Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Sympathetic Pregnancies

1

I found myself in a room with nine pregnant women. All of the women were in the very late stages of their pregnancies-very late. Their deliveries past due, they waited in this converted surgical recovery room for their labors to commence. All of them were massive. Their shapeless hospital gowns taking on now the sweeping contours of their swelling bellies and breasts amplified their heft by defining it, the fabric stretched taut across the rounded middles. They all were hugely uncomfortable, in pain, of course, and in various postures of steeping agony-standing, sitting, or splayed in a bed. They had all been induced, that is to say the synthetic hormone pitocin had been introduced into their blood streams via an intravenous drip to spark their bodies into productive contractions. And it was working in spades. The spasms now slamming through them were juiced by the chemical, boosted, turbo-charged. The kick they were receiving packed a bigger wallop than if the body had kicked off on the process of its own accord. This was truly gut-wrenching, a doubled definition of "spike" of pain. Some were hooked up to monitors that spit out a graph paper narrative scored with these mountain ranges of ragged edges that finally climbed and climbed-no denouement but only the inked evidence of one endlessly upward sloping excruciation.

I had been told to wait in the recovery room with nine women in the throes of labor by a distracted doctor at the main desk. My wife, on the verge of birthing her first son (birth imminent, the chart had read), stalled in the delivery during the final pushing. She had been whisked off to surgery for a c-section, leaving me alone in the birthing room with the beeping Plexiglas incubator warming up in the corner.

"What are you doing here?" an orderly asked as he wheeled in a bucket and mop to begin cleaning. I told him no one, in the haste to get to the operating room, had told me where to be, where to go. "Man, you can't be here," he said, "I've got to get this room ready for the next one. They're stacked up out there." So I drifted down to the desk and to the distracted doctor who told me to take a seat in the recovery room.

The women in the room began, in their individual expressions of pain, to come into a communal tune. Each whelp or moan began to synchronize, a kind of round harmony. The sound was transmitted around the room, an a cappella fugue of agony. The women peaked one after the other. The last one subsiding into a whimper just as the next reached a muscular grunt and growl. It was as if there was only one big contraction that oscillated around the room or that, in fact, the room itself rippled in one long ululation of a continuous sustained contraction. Nurses and midwives whispered to their laboring patients to "ride" the contraction, and the cacophony in the room had the orchestrated order of the squealing shriek of a train of roller coaster cars. As each woman emerged from her most recent bout with her body (her body that now was not her body but possessed by these biological imperatives and hormonal accelerants that split open a body to expel another body), each opened her eyes to see me sitting by the door. And as they focused on me, as they waited for the next spasm to grip them, I could tell they really, really didn't want me there.

2

In high-school health classes, it once was popular to have the students carry around, for days or weeks at a time, ten-pound bags of flour. The exercise was meant to simulate the weight of a newborn baby and the sustained lugging to condition the sexually active or soon-to-be sexually active teenager to the consequence of sexual activity, pregnancy, and the consequence of the consequence, live birth. The flour bags would be hauled to classes, held while eating lunch, babysat in gym class. Some students even dressed their bags of flour or pretended to change the bag of flour's diaper, an apparent mass hysteria to better imagine this potential semiattached dependent human mass.

Ten pounds! It is interesting that the birth announcement boilerplate contains a space for the newborn's weight. What other formal communication announces that information? Obituaries do not state that, at the time of death, the deceased tipped the scales at a svelte 185. Nor do wedding invitations report the fighting weight of the bride and groom. Perhaps there is just not that much to describe when we describe a baby, a baby so easily disguised as a bag of flour. We are left with the basics. Color of hair and eyes can change, and so such intelligence is rarely shared. The kid's size, the length and weight, is hardly static, and yet it is duly noted along with the name and the time and date of delivery into the world. Most likely we broadcast the heft of the infant because all through gestation it has been the focus, this hidden relentlessly growing thing, this curious expanding loaf, a kind of staple. The newborn remains pretty much that way for months outside the womb, a swaddled package. In short, the baby is an embodiment of human weight itself. It boils down to bulk. Ten pounds!

So after the birth of my sons, I gained a different kind of weight. Where my wife had come equipped with organic cavities to host the burgeoning other, I had to make do with these artificial blisters-the Snuglis, the papoose cradle boards, and canvas backpacks-girded to my body by contraptions of harness tack and strap. I had a baby sling, an ingenious device that looked and was worn like a Confederate soldier's bedroll. I draped it over one shoulder and it rode around the opposite hip, and then across the back. The sling was even made out of sturdy striped ticking and expanded like a kangaroo's pouch to allow the baby to ball up inside the enveloping folds. The tug of gravity then cinched tight, suspending the joey in this simulated womb. I could not resist rubbing this new belly of mine, massaging this living dead weight that only occasionally stretched, compressed beneath the smooth skin of fabric. How my body was contorted. And how I contorted my body simply to bear this childbearing. I discovered the shelves and hooks, the nooks and ledges of my anatomy to shift the baby about, not hot potato so much as a slippery, springy sack of spuds. My hips. My shoulders. My lap. My elbow's crook. Any port in a storm. I piggybacked. I made a swing of my distended arms. The baby rode my butt, my hands behind me, the laced fingers saddling his behind. I was, during the infancy, a declension of containment-hold, held, holding. Even when exhausted I could not shed this limp limpid. On my back. The baby bedded down on my front, bore down, bearing his full and concentrated weight asleep on my belly.

It isn't hard to make the leap. The literal weight that must be borne comes to stand, in a very solid way, for the metaphoric tare a parent incorporates. I was weighed down and weighed down. As a father I grew grosser by the day, by the ounce.

3

During the nine months my wife was pregnant with our first child, I gained twenty-five pounds. After he was born, I didn't lose the weight and actually gained twenty-five more pounds during my wife's pregnancy with our second son five years later. I like to think of it as sympathetic pregnancy, my body so in sync with my wife's that I matched her transformation pound for pound. My empathetic sensibilities did not extend, thank goodness, as they sometimes do, to experiencing a parallel brace of Braxton-Hicks contractions or a bout of morning sickness. It might be that I lacked the imagination to actually rewire my body's endocrine system to that degree of reproductive fidelity. I simply grew.

The weight did settle on my belly. As my wife grew rounder so did I. 1 suffered only friends and family, even while they admired and approved of the sensual fleshing-out of my wife, aghast at my own transforming body. "Oh that," I said, "the couvade," invoking the French for the phenomenon in order to (what?) make the weight gain arty or legitimate or scientific or, at the very least, explainable.

Couvade translates as the "hatching" or "nesting" and was first applied by anthropologists upon discovering cultures where husbands performed ritual renditions of labor in their own dedicated hut while their wives wailed for real in a hut next door.

It helped to bring up sympathetic labor as the reason for what was happening to me, to my body. We like to believe that we have control over our bodies, and for the most part we do. We control our bodily functions, command sleep, order movement. To exercise is to take one's body for a walk. But pregnancy puts a lie to such neat hierarchy of control. In pregnancy the body takes you for ride. You are at the mercy of the chemical equations coursing furiously through the body. The body's biological imperative. The physical results are stunning, sudden, and miraculous. Of course that is to say the "you" to whom the highjacking of pregnancy happens is not every "you." It couldn't really happen to me. I could only witness this metamorphosis. And, I guess, while witnessing, I wished to let myself go, to let my body go. Three-fourths of a year when new life is imminent allows the old life to be in abeyance. I let go without knowing I let myself go. I like to think I allowed my body to surprise me with my own generative process. But I believe my body did this on its own. The surprise was real.

To this day I still carry those extra fifty pounds, the current weight of my younger son. I carry the mass equivalent in size to this other person still. I have no other explanation for it. Sympathetic, my own gravidity.

4

The cravings were real but not at all original. Not pickles but ice cream. That fall we drove to Davis Square and Dave's Ice Cream and ordered dishes and cones of scoops and dips after test-tasting the new flavors, working our way through the tubs in the glassed-in frozen cases, collecting the tiny plastic spoons like charms. We drove to Harvard Square that fall, to Herrell's, who was also Dave but when he sold Dave's signed an agreement to stay out of the ice cream business. Dave loopholed his way back into the business on the strength of his family name. We were in a family way and craved ice cream. We craved chocolate ice cream, the subspecies of which (Dutch Chocolate, Belgian, Chocolate Fudge, Brownie, Chip, Double Chocolate, Mousse, White, Dark, Chocolate Chocolate Chip, Chunked, Cookied, Malted, Marbled, Mandarined, Mochaed, Minted, Plain) were as numerous as the other individual varieties found in the rest of the flavor spectrum. That fall we drove to Central Square and ordered ice cream at Toscanini's, asked that the various candies and cookies and fruit and nuts be mixed into our choice, folded together on a refrigerated marble slab. It looked, as the mixing commenced, as if the ice cream was consuming its ingredients, an enriching metabolism. We brought home pints and gallons of ice cream and didn't bother to decant the contents but spooned the confection directly from the container, producing deftly curling glazed and glistening waves of frozen ribbons rolling up into our mouths.

I marveled at the sculptural suggestiveness of this media. I loved how the shop scoops welded together. The balled ice cream towered, mounded, slumped into Willendorf Venuses atop a cone, how that hood ornament of ice cream modeled the rounded belly, breasts, and hips of a pregnant woman. Ice cream could be sculpted into bodies, and ice cream sculpted the bodies that consumed it. It layered and larded the articulated underlying skeleton. That fall, the fall of ice cream, under its influence and in its hands, we became these spherical corpulent snow people, artist's models. That fall our bodies bulged and bubbled. We became these B-shaped beings.

5

The story goes that my father, born at home, was thought to be, until the actual labor and delivery, a tumor. My grandmother, fearing the growth was a growth, ignored the symptom in order to ignore the expected diagnosis, and steered clear of doctors, denial being the only remedy she believed available to her. One hears of things like that happening, variations on a theme. The obese woman whose massive body masks to her and the world this other body swaddled within. And then there are the tumors that are, in fact, tumors but tumors masquerading as bodies. They are themselves the remains of other bodies of cells commencing on a reproductive journey only to lose interest-hair balls, sets of teeth, or even the mummified ghost of a fetal twin absorbed by the other in the womb, pregnant pregnancy, nesting nesting dolls. The belly and the womb may become confused. The swelling of one by all appearances identical to the other. There is the impolite inquiry of the heavy woman as to her due date. A man's beer gut distends in meticulous imitation or vice versa. And there is a further variation of our discomfort in our own skin. Shame, embarrassment, blush-this burning blindness of the body and it costume of skin. You hear of the impromptu birth in the high-school locker room, the bathroom at the prom. The student who abandons her baby after a full term of concealment. No one, when interrogated in retrospect, suspected, the complete camouflage of the body by the body. No one was able to distinguish the metamorphic growth spurts of an adolescent from those spawned by the spawn within. The body is so much about the Body. It grows, and it grows.

6

I do not faint at the sight of blood. I do faint at the mention of the word "blood." It has to do with the vagus, that vagabond cranial nerve that wonders down the neck and thorax and on into the belly. It is the conduit for sensation in a part of the inner ear, the tongue, the larynx, and pharynx, and it motors the vocal chords while it stimulates secretions to the gut and thoracic viscera. My friend, a doctor, called it "one very interesting piece of linguini." An overactive noodle can send the pulse racing and the blood pressure crashing, the electric schematic of sympathetic suggestion. In an instant the blood rushes to my feet, my wiring for some reason shorting out with this outsized response. I'm sensitive. To what? To words. I weathered the witnessing of the births of my two sons attending the attendant fluids, flesh, and surgery. But merely typing the above, thoracic viscera, had me going. I think it is the Latinates, the antique Greek, that medicine employs to sound disinterested that tweaks my vagal response. Doctors have this desire to explain, to render in that dispassionate vocabulary the description of the body. It backfires with me. Laceration for cut. Contusion for bruise. Hemorrhage. I'm more comfortable with bleeding. The impasse that necessitated my first son's birth by cesarean section was described as cephalo-pelvic disproportion. My heart, kardia, skips a beat, arrhythmic. These words for me are engorged, obese with what? Meaning? No, more than meaning. They are viral. They get under my skin, into my system. The codes wired into language still thrill my own harmonic neural strings.

I will tell you a secret. In college I wrote my stories and poems in the medical library, and between insights or inspiration, I sacked the stacks, looking for anatomies and dissection manuals, diagnostics and the casebook descriptions of diseases to read. They would produce in me when I read them a kind of high. These simple combinations of letters, of words, of sentences sparked a collapse of my involuntary systems and, in fact, revealed the existence of those invisible involuntary systems by this very intimate disabling. Mere words could do that. Make me sweat, pale, lose consciousness, collapse. The words about the body took on body. Words were impregnated with meaning, with power. Words have mass, weight, density, gravity. Words have a physics all their own-bodies in motion, bodies at rest.

7

She could keep nothing down. The paradox of morning sickness. Without ingesting any food she grew larger. The logic of dieting was busted. She busted open. The body reworked the material on hand, stored in a snub to entropy, a conservation of matter and energy. This was spontaneous generation. She was sick to death and brimming with health.

There was the time during her pregnancy where she could only stomach white food, beige food at best. Yogurt, rice, mashed potatoes, and oatmeal. As I remember this now, it seems I spent forever making oatmeal in the mornings so that she could get out of bed. I became attuned to the amount of water I added, the amount of time it took to boil. The consistency of the final gruel seemed vital. Too runny or too stiff would trigger another round of debilitating nausea. I was Goldilocks daily searching for this mean, obsessed with food that finally in the fairy tale seemed disconnected from nutrition, diet, weight gained or lost. I remember trying to secret a few raisins, disguised as lumpy clots of cereal, dusting them with camouflaging nutmeg or cinnamon that only initiated in her a gag reflex and revulsion. I finished up the starchy intolerable repasts, thinking I shouldn't let this go to waste, standing before the sink, the stove with a bowl and spoon, eating whitely.

8

There is so much we don't know about pregnancy. For instance, the reasons my wife lost two before the first baby was born and then lost two more before the second. At the time all the doctors vaguely indicated not to worry until the third miscarriage in a row, citing the hopeful notion of diagnostic drift to explain their nonchalance. They figured that miscarriages had been happening with similar frequency and number for all of human history; it's just that now our diagnostic tools were better able to record it. No worry. Come back if it happens again, we were told. The drift of such drift, however, becomes its own explanation. Miscarriages go unexamined-no longitudinal studies, no clinical analyses. Mothers who want to pursue the causes, of course, lose interest when the next pregnancy takes and goes to term, any study of past outcomes forgotten in the time-consumed present moment. We forget to remember. So no one knows. It's a mystery.

All her life my wife has dreamed this rather common dream. She is falling. As she falls she thinks that she is falling and that she is going to die. She plummets, closes on the ground. And then wakes up. Sleeping after she delivered her first baby, she had the dream. She was falling. But this time, as she fell, she didn't think while she was falling that she was going to die. As she fell in her dream, she thought: "Who is going to take care of my baby?" Poets are drawn to a word like "cleave," a word that contains a meaning and simultaneously its opposite meaning. My wife is a poet. Birth is a cleaving and a cleaving.

After the third miscarriage my wife asked the young athletic attending physician when she could start up again. The doctor, perhaps distracted by her charting, perhaps simply self-absorbed, answered that my wife could resume exercise in a few days, later today if the signs indicated. Had we interrupted, with our emergency, this doctor's daily jog, her own regimen of working out? She was wearing running shoes, her hair tied back, sweats. Was she assessing my wife's bulked up body differently now that the body was no longer bulk for a purpose, was no longer pregnant? Time to get back into shape. Into shape. As the saying goes you can't be half pregnant. My wife in an instant had become out of shape. The doctor had misunderstood. My wife was asking how long before we could start again to have sex, to make a baby, to be pregnant. She wanted to get back into that shape.

9

We took pictures. A few days before she was due, she took off her clothes and posed in our sunny living room. There is an extremity to the nakedness during labor. The clothing of modesty is readily shed. The staged renditions of the moment on television and in movies are hilarious with their persnickety management of drapery and screens. We are all born naked. My wife had back labor, and for a while a warm compress on her lower spine helped relieve the pain. Until it didn't. She had dilated, was in the part of labor called transition. She had changed. I applied the heated towel again. "What are you doing?" she screamed. "It feels like you are ripping off my skin!" This nakedness was beyond skin-deep.

Back to the pictures, to the evidence of that body. We marvel still at its transformation. There is the apparent impossibility of it. How could it possibly work? It is freakish in proportion and scale, gravity-defying and grave. There is a luxuriousness as well. The skin, yes, glows. The darker skin of the aureoles, the eyelids, the lips grow darker. On the center line of the belly a vertical line appears running from the sternum, circumventing the belly from pole to pole. The telltale sign of the stomach's rectus muscle's separation, split open like, well, ripe fruit. You can't help it-all the cliches are true. The pregnant body is not a human body any more but a metaphor for ripe, for full. My wife no longer recognizes herself in the pictures. It was a strange visitation, her body inhabited both by a new body and this other body built to birth the baby. We look at the pictures with nostalgia and anticipation. Birth imminent. For me the pregnant body is freakish but irresistible. It is as if the human species is made up of three genders, this new other one, this thing. Or more exactly that the two sexes give birth to this new species. This other other. Obstetric, that Latinate word, means to stand in opposition to. I am sympathetic. But, finally, I have no choice. I must, we all must, wait on it.